DECEMBER 3

Black Swan
DW: It’s a little surprising, but not unwelcome, to see an American writer and director make a film that looks and seems so much like a European thriller. I’m happy with this, as my taste in the genre veers more towards the stylized approach and psychological themes of the European thrillers than the violent and gruesome approach that seems to be dominant in the American approach. Portman has been getting a lot of praise for her role as a repressed ballerina who can’t quite rise to the demands of her …

November! The leaves are turning, the air is chilling, and the last of the Halloween cash-in movies are wrapping up their time in our movie theaters and we’re making way for one of the two most profitable movie-going days of the year: Thanksgiving. Here we have a grab bag of stuff the studios hold in good esteem: high-profile comedies, sci-fi epics, high-octane action flicks, the beginning of the end of a major franchise, and a new Disney princess film.
Bureau Chiefs Ken Lowery and Dorian Wright take a look at what …

October’s here, which means the trailers for the winter’s Oscar bait are making their premieres and cheapie scary movies are released upon the teenaged public — complete with a new Saw installment. September was mostly a pretty grim month for movies, but October promises something a bit better: A wider mix of good talent and subject matter, from high brow to low.
OCTOBER 1

Let Me In
DW: At the best of times, I’m pretty skeptical of both vampire films and of remakes of horror films. The pedigree for this story of a …

And now we tread headlong into the limbo between summer blockbuster season and Oscar season (with a quick stop over in Horror Town in late October). What do September’s offerings have in common? Not a whole lot: there’s some serious highbrow stuff alongside lower-end fare, horror films and biopics and even a bit of Mexploitation.
No, the only thing September’s releases have in common are maddeningly non-specific titles that make it hard to quickly search for relevant images on Google.
SEPTEMBER 1
The American
KL: George Clooney remains one of the true “stars” left …

After a long day at work, the Bureau Chiefs like to relax in bed with books and comic books. Since there are 16 of us, our bed is 64 feet wide and our nightstand is the size of a small elephant. Here’s what is stacked up next to it.
Ken
After a long spell of reading only comics, the wife and I took a trip to nearby bookstore Legacy Books. I’m embarrassed to say I did not know this enormous independent bookstore existed, despite the fact it was about 15 minutes away …

As summer winds down to August, all those movies that studios either couldn’t make sense of or otherwise couldn’t cut it get unleashed on the public. Consequently August is a kind of limbo; most of the releases have the hallmark of a blockbuster but aren’t quite “award season” material. They’re somewhere in between. As with February, some serious gems can slip in under the radar. But there’s a lot of chaff to get through to find that wheat.
Bureau Chiefs Dorian Wright and Ken Lowery take a look at the upcoming …

Give the advertising campaign credit: “Who is Salt?” isn’t just a marketing tagline, but the question you’ll find yourself asking over and over as Salt unreels before you. At first Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) appears to be a CIA agent with a loving husband and a normal life, but it isn’t long before she’s crossing and double-crossing people without explaining to anyone, least of all the audience, why she’s doing what she’s doing.
And on paper, that’s kind of a nifty idea. Salt is undeniably the protagonist of the movie; we …

Christopher Nolan’s characters live in a world of ideas. They’re trapped by them, enslaved by them, dominated by them and ruled by them. They are fallible people who externalize every lash on their souls; their gestures change the world and they know it, but they know also that they will never live up to the abstract ideals they forever chase or evade. They are haunted by dreams dashed, lost, or inadequately conceived.
Therefore it seems predestined that Nolan would eventually tap Leonardo DiCaprio to play one of his leads. DiCaprio has …

It’s true that the only thing outpacing articles about the death of film criticism these days are articles about the articles about the death of film criticism. In fact, we’ve now reached the third stage of meta-commentary: articles about the articles about the articles about the death of film criticism. I suppose this counts for the latter, which is fitting. I had something to say in the first wave, too.
That’s to be expected. Critics are by their nature prone to analysis and exposition, and if they’ve got the pulpit, by …

John’s got a problem: ever since his wife left him seven years ago, his life has been one long, slow spiral into the gutter. He’s functional and continues to work, but that’s about all that can be said for him. So when his ex (Catherine Keener, whose presence always improves a movie’s charisma) invites him to her engagement party with the stated purpose of meeting women, he accepts. Grudgingly. His pick-up technique involves long, intense spiels about the hopelessness of his life and how finding someone to connect with may …